On September 14, 2010, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) issued its judgment in the case of Akzo Nobel and Akcros Chemicals on the question whether communication with in-house lawyers is protected by legal professional privilege. The case involved an investigation by European Commission authorities of possible anti-competitive practices wherein officials took copies of a number of documents...
Guidance on Due Diligence
M&A Law Prof Blog has a link to JeffreyWeiner’s Due Diligence in M&A Transactions: A Conceptual Framework which provides an overview of the due diligence process and its objectives in an M&A transaction. It will be a particularly useful reading for corporate lawyers who are starting out this season.
Bombay High Court on the Entry of Foreign Law Firms
The Bombay High Court (Swatanter Kumar C.J. and J.P. Devdhar J.) has held that foreign law firms are not eligible to practice law in India even in a non-litigation context. Foreign law firms are also not entitled to open liaison offices in India. The case is Lawyers Collective v. Bar Council of India and Others, Writ Petition No. 1526/1995, judgment dated 16th December 2009 (per Devdhar J.). It...
Law Firms and Joint Ventures
A few months ago, we had posted about a paper by Professor Jayanth Krishnan on issues that revolve around the opening up of the Indian legal sector to foreign law firms. He has now released the results of another interesting piece of research titled The Joint Law Venture: A Pilot Study that examines the rate of success or failure of joint ventures between law firms by looking closely at the...
Budget 2009: Key Features and Some Thoughts
India’s Finance Minister, Mr. Pranab Mukherjee, presented the Government’s annual Budget in Parliament yesterday. While commentators brand it a mixed bag, the stock markets do not seem to have received the Budget favourably as the stock indices experienced their largest Budget-day fall in history. The purpose of this post is to highlight some of the key items in the Budget that impact the...
Globalisation and the Indian Legal Sector
In what may perhaps be the first academic study in the field, Professor Jayanth Krishnan examines the issues that revolve around the opening up of the Indian legal sector to foreign law firms. In his paper Globetrotting Law Firms, which is the product of empirical study through fieldwork and interviews, Professor Krishnan comprehensively discusses various policy arguments and suggests some...
Legal Practices and Public Ownership
We have previously discussed on this blog (here and here) the phenomenon whereby law firms could undertake transactions such as public offering of securities and buyouts. The current issue of The Economist carries a column on this topic. Here is an extract: “Investing in law firms is more than just a pipe dream. A change in British law, introduced last year, enables law firms to use business...
Disclosure Norms for Law Firms
So far, public listings of securities by law firms has not caught on despite the first law firm (Australia’s Slater & Gordon) listing about a year ago. The legal practice regulations in most jurisdictions do not permit law firms to either take a corporate form or to issue its securities to the public. But, if law firms are permitted to go public, and indeed if they do so, they would be...
Buyouts & Law Firms
Thus far, I could only imagine law firms being involved in private equity funding and buyouts as legal advisors on deals.
But, now it appears that we may begin to witness private equity funding and buyouts OF law firms. For details: Law.com and TimesOnline.
On Being a Corporate Lawyer
The Harvard Law School Corporate Governance Blog carries a post regarding a lecture by John C. Coates titled “On Being a Corporate Lawyer” that he delivered on being appointed the John F. Cogan, Jr. Professor of Law and Economics. A webcast of the lecture is also available. Coates talks about trends in current corporate law practice and shares his thoughts on what the future holds. Having been a...
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